Remove last occurrence of pattern and everything after that - regex

I want to remove last occurrence of a pattern "\[uU]" and everything after it from a string.
Example:
input: ab00cd\u00FF\U00FF0000
output: ab00cd\u00FF
I am doing this currently with something like lastIndexOf and substring and I wonder if there is a Regex way to do it. I figure it might involve lookarounds?

Match \U that isn't followed by \U.
You haven't said what language you're using, so the generic solution is:
Search: \[uU](?!.*\[uU]).*
Replace: <blank>
The negative look-ahead (?!.*\[uU]) asserts that \U (or \u) do not appear anywhere after the leading match.

Related

Trying to combine two Regex

I'm trying to combine two working regex patterns into one. Please let me know the correct syntax and if this can be better written.
Pattern 1: (?P<date>.*)\s+(?P<timezone>.*)\|.*\|.*\|(?P<ip>[\w*.:-]+)\|.*\|
Pattern 2: (?P<path>[^\/]+(?=\-[^\/-]*$))
Sample line:
06/Mar/2020:00:01:04 -0500|/TESTSTREAM|5766764|4.2.2.1|123290|path1/path2/x-fr-US.OPEN.1-Turtle-2020.30.04-64.mp3
The first expression matches the start of the string, the second matches the end, you can combine them by putting a non-greedy .*? between them, like this:
(?P<date>.*)\s+(?P<timezone>.*)\|.*\|.*\|(?P<ip>[\w*.:-]+)\|.*\|.*?(?P<path>[^\/]+(?=\-[^\/-]*$))
As you can see here this expression works, but it takes 1660 steps to match the string. This is because .* between | first capture the whole string up to the end, and then try to step back character by character in order to find the match.
If you use the non-greedy modifiers here: .*?, then the regex machine will initially match an empty string and then will need to move forward character by character until it finds the matching |. It will reduce the number of steps to 1183: demo
However, if you want to remove this backtracking (forward-tracking) at all, you can just very quickly skip as many non-| characters as possible with [^|]*. Similarly we can replace other .* patterns in the regex. The resulting regex finds a match in just 47 steps, more than 30-times less than the original regex:
(?P<date>\S*)\s+(?P<timezone>[^|]*)\|[^|]*\|[^|]*\|(?P<ip>[\w*.:-]+)\|[^|]*\|(?:[^\/\n]*\/)*(?P<path>.*)-.*
Demo here.
Update 2020-03-09
If you want to keep the last slash you can use this regex:
(?P<date>\S*)\s+(?P<timezone>[^|]*)\|[^|]*\|[^|]*\|(?P<ip>[\w*.:-]+)\|[^|]*\|.*?(?P<path>\/[^\/]*)-[^\/]*

Regex for selecting words ending in 'ing' unless

I want to select words ending in with a regular expression, but I want exclude words that end in thing. For example:
everything
running
catching
nothing
Of these words, running and catching should be selected, everything and nothing should be excluded.
I've tried the following:
.+ing$
But that selects everything. I'm thinking look aheads/look arounds could be the solution, but I haven't been able to get one that works.
Solutions that work in Python or R would be helpful.
In python you can use negative lookbehind assertion as this:
^.*(?<!th)ing$
RegEx Demo
(?<!th) is negative lookbehind expression that will fail the match if th comes before ing at the end of string.
Note that if you are matching words that are not on separate lines then instead of anchors use word boundaries as:
\w+(?<!th)ing\b
Something like \b\w+(?<!th)ing\b maybe.
You might also use a negative lookahead (?! to assert that what is on the right is not 0+ times a word character followed by thing and a word boundary:
\b(?!\w*thing\b)\w*ing\b
Regex demo | Python demo

RegEx lookahead but not immediately following

I am trying to match terms such as the Dutch ge-berg-te. berg is a noun by itself, and ge...te is a circumfix, i.e. geberg does not exist, nor does bergte. gebergte does. What I want is a RegEx that matches berg or gebergte, working with a lookaround. I was thinking this would work
\b(?i)(ge(?=te))?berg(te)?\b
But it doesn't. I am guessing because a lookahead only checks the immediate following characters, and not across characters. Is there any way to match characters with a lookahead withouth the constraint that those characters have to be immediately behind the others?
Valid matches would be:
Berg
berg
Gebergte
gebergte
Invalid matches could be:
Geberg
geberg
Bergte
bergte
ge-/Ge- and -te always have to occur together. Note that I want to try this with a lookahead. I know it can be done simpler, but I want to see if its methodologically possible to do something like this.
Here is one non-lookaround based regex:
\b(berg|gebergte)\b
Use it with i (ignore case) flag. This regex uses alternation and word boundary to search for complete words berg OR gebergte.
RegEx Demo
Lookaround based regex:
(?<=\bge)berg(?=te\b)|\bberg\b
This regex used a lookahead and lookbehind to search for berg preceded by ge and followed by te. Alternatively it matches complete word berg using word boundary asserter \b which is also 0-width asserter like anchors ^ and $.
To generally forbid a sign, you can put the negative lookaround to the beginning of a string and combine it with random number of other signs before the string you want to forbid:
regex: don't match if containing a specific string
^(?!.\*720).*
This will not match, if the string contains 720, but else match everything else.

regular expression doesn't match, why?

I want to match all paths that:
don't start with "/foo-bar/"
or not ends with any extension (.jpg, .gif, etc)
examples:
/foo-bar/aaaa/fff will not match
/foo-bar/aaaa/fff.jpg will not match
/aaa/bbb will match
/aaaa/bbbb.jpg will not match
/bbb.a will not match
this is my regex:
^\/(?!foo-bar\/).*(?!\.).*$
but is not working, why?
thanks!
It is more easy to try to match what you don't want. Example with PHP:
if (!preg_match('~^/foo-bar/|\.[^/]+$~', $url))
echo 'Valid!';
Your pattern doesn't work because of this part .*(?!\.).*$. The first .* is greedy and will take all the characters of the string until the end, after, to make the end of the pattern to succeed, the regex engine will backtrack one character (the last of the string). (?!\.).*$ will always match this last character if it is not a dot.
If you absolutely need an affirmative pattern, you can use this:
if (preg_match('~^/(?!foo-bar/)(?:[^/]*/)*+[^./]*$~', $url))
echo 'Valid!';
You can try this one, which is a bit simpler and close to what you have tried:
^(?!\/foo-bar)([^\.]+)$
Live Demo

Regex for deleting characters before a certain character?

I'm very new at regex, and to be completely honest it confounds me. I need to grab the string after a certain character is reached in said string. I figured the easiest way to do this would be using regex, however like I said I'm very new to it. Can anyone help me with this or point me in the right direction?
For instance:
I need to check the string "23444:thisstring" and save "thisstring" to a new string.
If this is your string:
I'm very new at regex, and to be completely honest it confounds me
and you want to grab everything after the first "c", then this regular expression will work:
/c(.*)/s
It will return this match in the first matched group:
"ompletely honest it confounds me"
Try it at the regex tester here: regex tester
Explanation:
The c is the character you are looking for
.* (in combination with /s) matches everything left
(.*) captures what .* matched, making it available in $1 and returned in list context.
Regex for deleting characters before a certain character!
You can use lookahead like this
.*(?=x)
where x is a particular character or word or string.{using characters like .,$,^,*,+ have special meaning in regex so don't forget to escape when using it within x}
EDIT
for your sample string it would be
.*(?=thisstring)
.* matches 0 to many characters till thisisstring
Here is a one-line solution for matching everything after "before"
print $1."\n" if "beforeafter" =~ m/before(.*)/;
Edit:
While using lookbehind is possible, it's not required. Grouping provides an easier solution.
To get the string before : in your example, you have to use [^:][^:]*:\(.*\). Notice that you should have at least one [^:] followed by any number of [^:]s followed by an actual :, the character you are searching for.